When I was a student at the University of Michigan, Lee Bollinger was dean of the law school. The biggest campus controversy during my time there (1988-1992) involved the speech code — my newspaper, the Michigan Review, fought it fiercely. We would have welcomed the support of someone like Bollinger, a self-styled First Amendment expert. But he was a total non-prescence. A few years ago, Bollinger was a candidate for the Havard presidency; Jeff Jacoby wrote an excellent column on the man’s free-speech record:

Veterans of the fight against the speech code remember vividly that Bollinger did not speak out publicly until the matter was already in federal court. “He simply kept his mouth shut,” said Wesley Wynne, the Michigan teaching assistant who filed the lawsuit for fear that he could be punished if he voiced a controversial opinion in class. “This man was dean of the law school. If anyone was in a position to exercise moral suasion, it was him…. His silence in public was a tacit endorsement of the curtailment” of free speech.
A former Michigan graduate student now teaching at Harvard says that this first major challenge to a speech code “was a time for First Amendment leadership, and Bollinger certainly didn’t show any.”